I’D READ BOOKS WHERE HONEYMOONS BEGAN with a glamorous send-off and a voyage to Europe. Ours started in the back of a musty, rocking wagon, among crates of rice and shovels and tarps and clods of dirt—and a heated discussion.
“Do you believe it?” I asked Samuel. “What my father said.”
“I knew my father was in Europe,” he replied, “but he didn’t mention your father at all, or any of that other stuff.”
“Of course not. It’s too shameful.”
“If it’s even true. Your father’s not exactly trustworthy!”
“Neither is yours. He steals.”
“And you think he stole your father’s fiancée too?”
“‘Seduced’ was the word he used.”
The word had a distracting shape and shimmer to it; it swayed there between us, and for a moment we both stared at it in silence.
Samuel cleared his throat. “That word can have many meanings. It doesn’t have to mean he . . . well, had intimate relations with her.”
“My mother!”
“She wasn’t your mother yet. And remember, your father also used the word ‘courted.’ ‘Courted’ is very different from ‘seduced.’ That’s just wooing. Anyway, you’re assuming it’s all true! My father denied it, and we never heard his side!”
“Well,” I said, “something happened between our fathers—at least it helps explain why they hate each other so much.”
“They have plenty of other reasons to hate each other,” he replied, sensibly enough.
His fingers prodded at his bruised stomach, and he winced, then looked off, his eyes sad.
“I hit him. My own father.”
I put my arm around him. “He richly deserved it.”
He nodded but looked unconsoled.
“You’re a fiery pair,” I told him. “You’ll reconcile. Do you think our fathers ever will?”
It hadn’t occurred to me before this moment. Up till now, every thought had been on what kind of husband Sam would be and whether he’d give me what my father never would. But right now I couldn’t help wondering what our lives would be like if we could never bring our families together.
Savagely Sam said, “I don’t care. I’m disgusted with both of them.”
“Me too, but . . . it would be sad if they never accepted it. Us.”
He shrugged, like he didn’t want to consider it anymore.
“We were motherless,” I said, “and now we’re fatherless, too. We’re like orphans.”
He pulled me close, just as I’d wanted him to.
“Can we be orphans,” he asked, “if we have each other?”
“Yes,” I said.
“So here’s what we’re looking for,” I told them. “Twenty, maybe thirty years ago, a man found a huge tooth in the rock. The story makes it sound like there might’ve been a jaw, maybe a bit of skull. Every year the rock crumbles, and the bones weather out, so we should have even more to see now. Rachel’s a better drawer than me, so she’s going to sketch out what the skull might look like.”
The light was low. It had taken us most of the day to reach the three buttes on the Sioux boy’s map. Outside of Crowe we’d met up with the rest of Barnum’s men and traveled north over rolling grassland, keeping the sunken badlands to our left. From our high vantage point I watched the turns of the brown winding river, matching them to the map. The prairie became rockier. It looked parched and underfed. When I finally saw those three tall buttes, crowded together like a trio of nuns, I felt my shoulders relax and realized how tightly my fears had been clenched up inside me. The buttes were real. The Sioux boy hadn’t lied about that.
We were far from the river now, but Thomas found a nearby creek, and we pitched camp there. With only a half hour of light left, there was no point prospecting, but I’d gathered everyone around for a talk. They were all crouched in front of me and Rachel like I was giving a class. Like I was the professor. This was my quarry, my dig. I was giving the orders to men much older than me, and it took some doing. I wanted to appear strong. I couldn’t falter, or the men would smell it and lose faith in me.
I looked now at Rachel, who had a stick and was ready to draw on the parched earth. “Do you remember the Laelaps skull?” I asked her.
She nodded. “I’ll make it a bigger version.” And as she drew, she narrated. She was very skilled. “So here’s the mandible, the lower jaw. There might be teeth still in the jaw. The teeth are big, remember, almost a foot, banana shaped, but some will be smaller, some broken into pieces. Teeth are pretty easy to spot; they’re enameled, smooth, with a shine to them. Now, the rest of the skull . . . there’ll be gaps, do you see? That’s the orbit, the big hole where the eye was, and then below that several other gaps. Fenestra they’re called. That’s just Latin for ‘windows,’ one here, and here, and a smaller one for the nostrils at the very front.”
She probably could have laid off with the Latin, but the men seemed to be paying attention fine. The fellow with the scary eyes, Hobart, spent a little too much time looking at her instead of her drawing, which worried me.
“How big’s the skull?” Withrow wanted to know.
“Five feet across, give or take,” I said.
He gave a slow whistle of appreciation.
“You might also find some bits of the spine near the skull. Rachel, can you sketch those, too? See, they’re weird-looking things, lots of spiky bits jutting off from the ring. You probably won’t see any of this all neat and tidy. It might be busted up and scrambled. If the bones have been exposed for a while, they might be bleached white. But other ones might be dark. Silvery black is what we’re hoping for, just like the Black Beauty’s tooth. Just keep your eyes open, and if you see something on the ground, look up, because there’s something higher up the slope.”
“How do we tell them from rocks?” asked Withrow’s other man, Browne. He had a bushy red beard, and there was a bit of food stuck in it, maybe the same bit I’d seen all day. “I’ve been staring at stuff for weeks, and half of it looks like rock or old wood. Only way I can tell for sure is if the thing looks like a big chicken drumstick.”
I made myself chuckle, even though it worried me they were still so inexperienced. “If it’s bone weathered out,” I said, “it might have lichen on it, usually yellow. It might look a bit like wood—you’re right, it’s hard to tell—but bone’s got a darker, purply color sometimes. Also, bone’s porous. You can put your tongue to it. If it sticks for a second, it’s bone. Rock won’t do that. You see anything and you’re not sure, just call out.”
Thomas said, “We should keep a lookout for the Sioux, too.”
“A very good point,” Withrow said. “Thomas tells me we’re close to Indian territory.”
“How close?” I asked.
“A couple of miles to the north,” Thomas said.
I glanced at Rachel. I hadn’t realized we were so close.
“Well, at least we’re on the safe side,” I said.
Thomas shrugged. “I don’t think lines on a map mean anything anymore. They get scribbled out and moved around too much.”
“We put some space between our tents and yours,” Mr. Withrow told me and Samuel.
I was glad it was dark, so my blush wouldn’t show.
“And, Sam,” said Hobart, “check for rattlesnakes first, boy. One snake in a tent’s enough.” He laughed at his own vulgar joke.
We’d finished cleaning up the dinner, and I was glad when Sam and I made our way to the tent. And I did check for snakes. I’d been doing it every night since we reached the badlands. During the day they’d sometimes slither inside for the shade, and at night they liked the heat of human bodies—even Aunt Berton’s wizened armpit.
Inside our tent there was just room for our two bedrolls, squished side by side. I set our lantern wick low. Samuel buttoned the flaps and then kissed me ardently. We fell back together onto the bedclothes.
“I’ve been waiting to kiss you all day,” he said.
“Really?” Most of the day he’d seemed so intent on his map, scanning the horizon for our buttes. I’d wondered if I was in his thoughts at all.
“Yes!” he said.
“It occurred to me once or twice, I suppose.” I was playing at being coy, something I’d never done before, but it made him smile.
“Is the ground hard enough for you?” he inquired, thumping the bedroll with his fist. “Or would you like it a little bit harder?”
“At least it doesn’t squeak,” I said. The thought of the four men milling about mere yards away did make me feel a bit self-conscious. “You were good with Withrow and his men,” I told him.
“Was I?”
His uncertainty was genuine, and it touched me. I thought his natural charm and confidence would float him through everything like a magic carpet. I nodded my reassurance, but then wished I hadn’t mentioned it at all, because his eyes were suddenly distracted.
“Will your father come looking for you?” he asked.
“I think so, yes.”
“He’ll want to separate us.”
“But he can’t. We’re married. You have the certificate.”
“Ripped in half. You never told him about our map?”
“Of course not!”
“If he’s got the army scouts looking, we’ve got a week, probably less, before they spot us. He’ll want to take over our site.”
“Well, he can’t. He doesn’t own the badlands.”
“Neither do we. He could plonk himself down nearby and start prospecting. We’ve got to work fast.”
I put my hand on the back of his neck and felt the cords of his muscles soften. His shoulders relaxed. “We don’t need to think about that now,” I said. “We’re on our honeymoon.”
He grinned and let out a long breath. We kissed and touched each other and moved the lantern off to one side so we wouldn’t kick it over as we undressed. His body was still so new to me, but it already felt surprisingly natural to see it naked. I was very curious about it. Under the blanket I felt his hardness against me, and even though I wanted to be as close to him as possible, I was nervous, remembering last time.
I did like his weight upon me; it made me feel safe. I knew the mechanics of how mammals mated—I’d seen them do it—and I knew where the parts went. But I’d never had a mother to tell me how it would feel. Asking Papa had never for one second occurred to me. As for Aunt Berton, the idea was simply too horrifying. I don’t think she’d ever known a man’s touch. I’d never known about the pain—and maybe there wasn’t even supposed to be pain. I was not some squeamish girl; I’d broken my arm when I was eight and not cried at all, even when the doctor was clumsy setting the bones. But now I was afraid I was abnormal.
When he came into me, I felt myself tense. It hurt, but not quite as much as last time.
“Should I stop?” he whispered in my ear.
I held him tight, bit my lip. “No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Keep going.”
Because now the pain was fading, and I was beginning to recognize the pleasurable tightening, the spreading heat I sometimes gave myself, only this time it was more urgent, and much, much better.
Rock like elephant hide. Rock cut deep with fissures. Rock sculpted into melting ice cream humps. The entire landscape looked like a giant wet cloth had been thrown over it, hanging saggy and furrowed and gray.
The sun high in the sky, my hair plastered inside my hat.
My mouth tasted like her mouth. My skin smelled like her skin.
Keep looking. Always be looking.
Underfoot: desperate little cacti, a sloughed snakeskin, dead grass, tiny rabbit skulls that would be fossils in a million years. And rocks, hundreds of rocks, a colorful mess a million years in the making. Sinkholes everywhere—some just big enough to pull in your leg and break it, others deep and wide enough to fit a man or two.
The deep curve of her waist where I’d gripped tight, the damp hair of her underarms.
It was much more desolate and scraggly up here than down by the river. Thomas had said these three buttes had a name. The Sisters. They had broad bases, ledges higher up, crooked peaks. It might take weeks to scour all their surfaces properly.
I’d split us up into two groups for now. I made sure Hobart, the scary-looking one, was in my group, along with Thomas, whom I sensed would have a good eye for spotting bone. Rachel was heading up the other group with Ethan Withrow and Browne. When people got a little better at telling rock from bone, I was hoping we could split off a third group, maybe even a fourth.
If the Sioux man had stumbled on the Black Beauty two or three decades ago, it must be much more exposed now. I imagined the skull jutting from the rock like a ship’s figurehead. I wanted to hear a shout from someone any moment now.
But all we’d spotted this morning was the bleached heap of a bison skeleton.
Evening came on, and we didn’t find anything more.
That night I dreamed the rex rose from the earth. Its scattered bones found one another, snapped themselves into place. I watched, jubilant. There it was! I’d found it! It became bigger and more fearsome by the second, and I began to feel afraid. What had I done? It snuffled the dirt for its missing teeth, and they lodged themselves into its jawbones. But it was still missing one tooth. It snorted. It stood to its full height and looked at me. It wanted the missing tooth. There was no chance of outrunning it. It stood taller and taller on the plain, looking down at me in fury.